 I'd like to talk to you this afternoon about two classes of Americans. And it may not be the two classes you think of, but nonetheless, there are two distinct classes in America and we have to break up. And we have to break up sooner rather than later. This is a bit of a long quote to start a talk with, but I thought I'd leave it up there for a little while so you could absorb it. It's written just about 100 years ago by Liddy Gunmesis and it rings absolutely as true today as the day he wrote it. And it's all about the idea of letting people go if they want to form a different political union or political entity. So at the end, he mentions true national and cultural policy. And so I would ask all of you today to consider, is America a nation at this point? I would argue no. Is it even a country, barely? Or is it, as some of you who heard my talking forward a couple of weeks ago, my friend Ilana Mercer calls it Walmart with nukes? And that's what America feels like very much today. It feels like we're all living in one big federal subdivision, doesn't it? So last night, I mentioned about 100 years ago in the interwar period, Mises wrote his great trilogy, three books, remarkable books, nation-state and economy first, then socialism, then liberalism, all within a 10-year span. And these three remarkable books basically laid out a blueprint for both organizing society in a prosperous and peaceful way and also a warning in socialism about how to destroy it. It turns out it's a lot easier to destroy than build. So Mises lays out this conception of what a liberal nationhood might look like. It's rooted in property, of course, and rigorous self-determination at home and what this means is that he's always stressing the right of secession. Back then, for political, linguistic, ethnic, economic minorities, always have the right to secede. And of course, coming out of the patchwork of the former Austro-Hungarian empire and in Europe, he understood what meant to be a linguistic minority in particular. So for Mises, any kind of nation, any kind of real nationalism, liberal nationalism, requires laissez-faire at home, of course. It requires free trade with your neighbors to avoid the tendency towards war and autarky and requires a non-interventionist foreign policy to avoid war and empire. So when we think of these three books, we can only imagine what the West and what America might look like today if these books had been read and absorbed broadly at the time. If Western governments had been even somewhat reasonable, let's say, over the past century, consuming, let's say, only 10 or 15% of private wealth and taxes, maintaining just somewhat reasonable currencies backed by gold, mostly staying out of education and banking and medicine, and most of all, avoiding supernational wars and military entanglements, if governments had just been somewhat reasonable in the West, we might still live in a more gilded era like Mises once enjoyed in Vienna. But with all the unimaginable benefits of our technology and material advances today. But the truth is that liberalism didn't hold, and we have to be honest with ourselves about it. It didn't hold in the West, and it never took root in the full Massessian sense anywhere, at least not for long, and that's why all of us are here today. If the world had listened to Mises even somewhat, if Western states had committed to prescription of sound money, markets, peace, all of our libertarian and anarcho-capitalist theory might have been completely unnecessary. We might be sitting here today just sort of grumbling about potholes and local property taxes and local schools. Instead, we're here talking about the state as an existential threat to civilization. So two very different scenarios. But again, the world didn't listen to Mises, so that's why it got Rothbard and Hoppe, by the way. So one of the great progressive achievements of the last 100 years, which goes almost totally unremarked today, goes to the title of my talk, the degree to which the imposers, we can call them, have been able to portray themselves as the imposed upon. It's absolutely uncanny. We see it in every aspect of American society and every aspect of our politics today. We see it in the presidential election. We see it with the culture wars. We see it in academia and spades. We see it with Antifa in the streets. So if we think about just the last 100 years, since Mises wrote those three books, the past century in America, progressives of all stripes, of all political parties, I wanna add. What have they given us? What have they given us? They've given us two world wars, Quagmires in Korea and Vietnam, now endless Middle East wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, maybe coming soon, Iran, who knows. They impose these enormous welfare schemes that Amy Schlage has written so much about in the form of the New Deal and Great Society programs which have ruined how many untold lives. They created all these alphabet soup federal agencies and departments to spy on us, tax us infinitely, regulate every aspect of our lives. And they built the military industrial complex and the state media complex and the state education complex. They legislated violations of basic human property rights which would absolutely shock our great-grandfathers if they were alive, all along with the courts nodding along in their acquiescence. And to pay for it all, they gave us central banking. The Federal Reserve System hatched up, schemed right here on this island in November of 1910. So what do they, the imposers call this, they call it liberalism. If you oppose it, they call you a reactionary. To be a libertarian today is to be a reactionary against the state degradations and depredations and impositions of the 20th century. And the political class, either the imposers themselves or their agents, what has the political class gotten us? Well, they managed to ruin peace. They managed to ruin diplomacy, money, banking, education, medicine, not to mention along the way, culture, civility, and goodwill. And if you oppose the imposers and their elites, they call you a populist for it. So call me a populist. All of this, of course, flows from the imposers, from their positive rights worldview, which animates them. It animates everything they do. And that's why they're able to scream at Rand Paul, for example, for denying them healthcare. Once you accept a positive rights view of the world, then anyone who doesn't go along with your program is taking from you. And this is how they see the world, the imposers. So if the 20th century represents a triumph of liberalism, I hate to see illiberalism. But of course, if you want to see it, we all know what the imposers have in store for us now in the fledgling 21st century. And I would add as an aside, a good way to tell maybe a Beltway person from a Rothbardian is to ask them a simple question of whether they consider the 20th century in the West a triumph of liberalism or not. I think most Rothbardians would say it was not. And I think most Beltway types would say it was. They consider the 20th century some sort of victory for liberalism. So what they got us, along with all of these other problems, is of course a huge divide. What they've gotten us is an almost unbelievably an epic divide in society between the imposers and the imposed upon. And so how divided are we, right? And along what kind of lines? I thought this was a nice little vignette, which took place the other day on Twitter. We have Chris Hayes, who is a subhuman who works at MSNBC. It says, well, you know, with COVID, the most responsible way to deal with all these people. That sounds like sign for those people. If we survive this as some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. Wow, that sounds fun. I suspect many of us in the room would be candidates for that. I don't know if there's boxcars outside. And then, so he represents the progressive left, I guess, in American today. And then along comes our friend from the neo-conservative right, the great Bill Crystal, with whom we've all had enough, but we always get more. I mean, this guy does not go away. I mean, he's like when you take the fish oil capsule at seven in the morning. And then at noon, that's Bill Crystal. So he says, how about truth and no reconciliation? The degree of open contempt and hatred that these lunatics have for us, is I suppose in part been exposed by Trump and Trumpism. And to that extent, we owe Trump a degree of gratitude for letting us see them for what they truly are. And I would ask either one of these gentlemen, if you truly believe, let's say 40% of the United States is beyond redemption, irredeemable, what does that mean? What do you propose doing with them? Does that mean some sort of a reeducation camp? I mean, presumably it means that either you separate from them somehow or you vanquish them. And by vanquish, that could be economically, politically, or in the horrific scenario, which we've seen repeated throughout history, even physically. So the divide we have in this country today is not so simple as saying blue and red states or counties or Republicans and Democrats or liberals and conservatives or even by class. It's a little more complicated than that. There's a company out there called Survey Monkey which took in a lot of data after the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And there was a big Washington Post story using this and they grouped it in a bunch of very interesting ways. And I wonder how much people in this room were aware of some of these divides in American culture. So sadly, there's a huge divide along racial lines in voting patterns. If only white people had voted in the 2016 election, Trump would have won 41 states. And if only non-white people had voted, Hillary Clinton would have won 47 states. So I view this as basically a testament to the Democrats' ability to sell some kind of sick victimhood and dependency and to the Republicans' failure to sell any sense of real ownership or opportunity or capitalism. But nonetheless, that's the divide. It's real. How about union members? If only union member households, in other words, a household with at least one union member had voted, Hillary Clinton would have won 40 states. And if no union members, Donald Trump would have won 37. Now when we get into religion, things get even more stark. What about households that claim within them that the inhabitants are either atheists or no particular religion? Hillary Clinton would have won at least 46 states if only non-religious people voted. How about if households which claim Protestant or Catholic membership would have been the sole voters? Trump would have won 45 states. Okay, evangelical voters only. Trump would have won 47 states. People who attend church weekly, Trump would have won 48 states. People who seldom or never attend church or synagogue, Hillary Clinton would have won 43 states. So it strikes me as we go through some of these numbers that these divides are awfully hard to overcome politically. I'm not sure how you do that. How about unmarried people? Hillary Clinton would have won 39 states if only unmarried people voted. Trump would have won 43 states if only married people voted. Another huge, quiet, cultural, and political gap in this country. Now you've heard a lot about urban versus rural voters. It's a motif which keeps coming up again and again. So for purposes of the survey monkey data, an urban county is one with greater than 530 voters per square mile. And a rural county is one with fewer than 90 voters per square mile. Again, only urban counties vote. Hillary Clinton wins 40 states. Only rural voters vote. Donald Trump wins 47 states. The last stat I'll throw out at you is gun owning households. Now I know that none of you own firearms, but there are people who do. They lock them up and just shoot deer with them. They don't have Oozies or anything like that. Modified weapons. Then they know there's no weapons in this room today. Feel comfortable with that statement. If only gun owning households voted, Donald Trump wins 49 states. Guess which one he loses, okay? The only one he loses is Bernie Sanders, Vermont. Because I think up there you just have a gun anyway just because you're in Vermont, but you vote for Bernie. So if Hillary Clinton, if households with no firearms of any kind were the sole voters in America, Hillary Clinton also wins 49 states. And guess which one she loses? West Virginia, another anomaly. The point here is that these kinds of divides and problems cannot be neatly solved by politics, especially national politics. And if you think about them, they don't cleave neatly along geographic lines. This isn't the Mason-Dixon line. These kinds of divides exist in every state. They exist within counties. If you go to California, which we all think of as a deep blue state, go 20 miles inland. You know what it is? It's Trump flags, it's country music, and it's Mexican rancheros. That's what it is. Okay, we don't have the Mason-Dixon line in America in 2020. And more importantly, what we have to understand is even if you could win some national election, you could somehow get 51% of the voters to vote for, you know, I don't know, a candidate like Rand Paul or something like that. It doesn't really matter because hearts and minds haven't changed. Politically vanquished people never really go away. This is what we have to understand. This is why we have to break up. Okay, a couple of years ago, Bloomberg did some polling in the former Soviet Union, now Russia. There are millions of Russians, especially elderly Russians, who still absolutely pine for the Soviet days. When they knew what their job was, they didn't have to pay for their apartment, et cetera. 70% of people in the former Soviet Union, now Russia, have overall generally beneficial views about Stalin. In 2019, okay? They view him as the great reformer who helped save their country from the Nazis, et cetera. In other words, despite all the historical examples that the 20th century provided us, despite the fall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite all the obvious benefits of capitalism, there is still a significant amount of nostalgia for the old system. Politically vanquished people don't just go away, okay? And the Hillary Clinton people thought that the deplorables were gonna do just that. They thought they were dying. They thought they were aging out, and they thought there were fewer of them than there were. And that's what happened in 2016. And that sent the entire country into basically some kind of psychosis, which we're still suffering under today. So I know it sounds difficult. I know that the concept of decentralization is one that's obvious and clear to all of you. I know secession seems like a tough go, but I wanna just throw out to you some happy, happy facts, some things that are happening slowly, right under our noses, some very decentralized impulses which are at work. And of course, they have been absolutely intensified by the COVID issue and by these terrible riots which have been roiling across the United States this summer and now into the fall. As it turns out, all crises happen to be local. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, one beautiful thing about COVID is that it has done further damage to our sort of credulousness when it comes to these so-called authorities, neither the UN nor the World Health Authority nor our own CDC has been able to project any sort of authority whatsoever amongst people. They have been able to drive no consensus. And as a result, we've had vastly different approaches to COVID across international lines and even within our 50 states and even within some states within various cities. So we've had this very decentralized approach to COVID. No central authority was able to sort of seize it and boss everyone around and tell everyone what to do. Of course, outlets like the New York Times tried to do that, but that's just in the United States. So it's been an absolutely fascinating to watch how places like Singapore and Hong Kong and Sweden have been relatively open and places like Shenzhen, excuse me, the province in China where it happened was drastically locked down. Some places like San Francisco have been drastically locked down here. So there's been different approaches in this decentralized effort. And none of this is because people woke up one day and said ideologically, wow, maybe we should try a more decentralized approach. No, it's just what naturally happens in crises. As a matter of fact, even the vaunted Schengen area agreement in Europe, which allows free travel between the member countries immediately broke down. All of a sudden, a German is a German again. And a Frenchman is a Frenchman and you can't even drive across. Who knew? As far as I know, I still don't think that Americans can drive or fly into Canada right now, even as we speak with this supposedly liberal Trudeau administration up there. So it turns out that when it comes to a crisis, things really get local very, very quickly. I mean, after all, no matter who you are, even if you're Bill Gates and you can buy 10 vacation houses and go to New Zealand on your yacht or something, you have to be somewhere physically. You have to exist in an analog world. And that means every, you need calories, you need kilowatts of energy and air conditioning coming into your home or your abode, you might need some healthcare, some prescription drugs. And all of this becomes unavoidable in a crisis. You have to be somewhere. And even Jeff Bezos, he had a bunch of protesters surrounding his house, his swanky house in DC. No, I don't know if he happened to be there at the time. But even if the point is that even Jeff Bezos could conceivably be contained in his home by a mob that you can't escape. So all of this idea that we were now on this sort of new global happy plane were sorely tested, I think, by COVID. And I think that the idea of political globalism, the bad kind of globalism is showing its strain. I think it's cracking very badly. Now here in America, let's talk about the great relocation that's happening. This incredible movement of people out of cities. I mean, what's the charm of a New York, a Manhattan, or a Chicago without the restaurants and the theaters and the food and the museums? I mean, it tends to be high rent, high crime, no fun. So we might find that a lot of younger people are starting to rethink things. So I think this form of de facto secession away from these big cities, which tend to be very, very left-wing in orientation, is a wonderful development to see because some of that political power that big cities tend to hold is going to be attenuated. Atlanta tends to control Georgia. Nashville increasingly controls Tennessee. We see this in a lot of states. Las Vegas controls Nevada. But if people start to move away from these big cities, then some of that political power similarly is going to go with them. So this decentralized impulse, which is really the untold story of the 21st century, we see it in companies and the way they organize and manage their teams. Now we're gonna have all kinds of teleworking, which I think is a mixed bag, but nonetheless it's happening one way or another. If we look at distribution systems, what used to be the old hub and spoke model of getting your products, the JCPenny catalog or something 40 years ago, get you that sweater. Well, now look at companies like Amazon that have a very decentralized sort of system of spiderwebs. So the distribution of goods and services is becoming radically decentralized. How we obtain information, it wasn't that long ago, you had to go 30 years ago, you had to go to your local mall or something and they might have a Milton Friedman's Free to Choose or John Kenneth Gailbreth's affluent society. They didn't have Rothbard. So libraries and universities and professors were almost kind of like the new versions of monks, right? They were the literate ones and you had to go to them to get information, but that's no longer the case. You have something in your pocket, the size of a deck of cards has basically all of human history on it. So that's hugely decentralized. And of course what we're seeing right now in the education revolution is just absolutely phenomenal. I mean, even before COVID came along, we had Khan Academy and all kinds of new platforms springing up and we had the student loan debt crisis and we had parents questioning the value of sending their kids to school for $40,000 a year so that they could get a degree which didn't get them a job. And then when they came home after those four years, they hate your guts. It turns out that that's not such a good value proposition. And of course, money in banking itself is becoming increasingly decentralized. We have all kinds of payment gateways now. We have things like PayPal. We have things like Bitcoin. And so really it's just that top layer of banking that is happening at major banks. So all of these things are happy facts. And all of these things I think are things we ought to be celebrating and thinking about when we consider the political landscape because I'm not so sure that what matters for our immediate future is whether Trump or Biden wins. I mean, we all know what Biden is and what he will do. We don't know what the hell Trump is or what he will do. That's what it means to be Trump. But nonetheless, I think some of these impulses which are happening are inexorable. I'm not sure that even Kamala Harris or Joe Biden can stop them. And I think we ought to celebrate that. But what's interesting is that the one thing which still seems awfully centralized in our world is the political world. In other words, in all these other areas of life, all these things I've just been mentioning, decentralization is something that's happening naturally. It's happening by market force. It's happening inexorably. And it's happening by free choice of people. But the one area of our lives where we still accept gross centralization and all the inefficiencies it brings with government. So many things that used to be decided at the regional or at the state and local, excuse me, at the city level are now decided at the regional or the state level. Things that used to be decided at the state level decided at the federal level. And then sometimes even at the international level. That's really the political story of the 20th century is the centralization of politics at higher and higher levels, which is of course anti-democratic even as though all these people are telling us about our sacred democracy. Every level of government that's further removed from you is attenuated by definition is less democratic because your input and your consent so-called is less and less meaningful. But I wonder if there aren't even some hopeful signs when it comes to politics and the decentralization of political power. At an event last fall in Vienna, Austria, Hans-Hermann Hoppe was on a panel. And one thing that struck me about what he said was if you look at the nationalist impulses of the 19th and 20th centuries, the patchwork of former Europe came together. You know, if you think of Germany as all these principalities and regions and Bavaria and Prussia and all this, you know, these things came together. He said nationalism in the 19th and 20th century was mostly a centralizing impulse. That's what nationalism meant. And of course, when it becomes belligerent and spills over its borders, you get aggressive, you get Nazi Germany or things like that. But he said in the 21st century from his perspective, nationalism movements tend to be decentralized. In other words, they're moving away from this sort of global government model which we all thought was going to be our future in the late 20th century. Remember the end of history? So Hoppe says if we look at things like the Brexit vote, if we look at what's happening in countries like Poland and Hungary, if we look at the Catalan, the Catalonian secession movement in the Barcelona and the Catalonian region of Spain, these tend to be breakaway, decentralized secessionist movements. So that's the difference between some of the national movements of today versus yesteryear. And I think this is coming soon to a city near you in the United States. I mean, this talk is really becoming a reality. Ryan McMakin, who's the editor of Mises Zorg, I saw him earlier, he's here today. Please say hi to him if you haven't met him. Just wrote an article about how even the mainstream publications now are talking quite openly and seriously about secession. And I think that's because on some level, nervously they still think Trump could win. I think that's what's driving it. But there have been very serious people on both left and right, not wild-eyed radicals like me, who have been talking about this for the last several years. Frank Buckley, a law professor at George Mason University. Oh, we can't say that anymore. I'm sorry, it's GMU. It turns out George Mason had a slave or two, sorry. GMU. He wrote a very serious book about what secession might look like just a year ago. And this is a sober, conservative guy. Similarly, Angelo Codavilla, who writes for the Claremont Institute, a retired professor of Boston University, I believe of classics, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe philosophy, wrote an article back in 2016 called The Cold Civil War. You can find it at Claremont.org on their website. Again, a very kind of sober, serious conservative, the kind of guy who still uses the lexicon of things like statecraft, you know what I mean. And they're talking about this. Similarly, people at places like on the left, at places like the New Republic and the nation are talking about this like never before. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, has applied the term nation state to his own state. And of course, if what happens in the fall, in a month, I guess, is that somehow, someway Trump manages to win this election, I don't know what that's gonna look like, I think we are going to see, first of all, an outpouring of grief and psychosis and outright violence from a significant portion of the country that we're just not prepared for. But I think when that subsides, you're going to simply see a blue state governor saying, no, we're walking away. And all that sort of sanctuary city talk will become more and more pronounced. And I think that'll be a beautiful and healthy thing for this country. Now, the flip side, and when I say who wins the election, I should say who's actually installed in January. We don't know anything about these ballots and post to delivery carriers, dropping them in sewers or whatever it might be. But whoever wins, if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are installed, I think what you're going to see is nothing short of a new reconstruction in America. I think you are gonna see outright and open attempts, gleeful attempts in the media class, these kinds of people, to impose themselves on the red states and punish them and punish them. Not only for having the audacity to put Donald Trump in the White House, instead of Hillary Clinton, whom we all knew was gonna win, but more importantly, on a more macro level, for coming along and interrupting that arc of history that progressives believe in so deeply, that arc that we're always improving and we're always getting better, the past is always bad and retrograde. So to have that upended by Trump is a sin which they still haven't gotten over. So if Biden and Kamala Harris win, you are gonna see things happen like, well, first of all, the sales tax deduction for state taxes will be immediately reintroduced so that those blue states can start deducting things again. But I think you'll see it in myriad ways. I think you will see sort of an outpouring, a collective outpouring from the left that wants to use the state as a sort of a laser focus to bludgeon us, the rest of us. And I think that in turn will cause the red state folks and the red state voters to be thinking very seriously about an exit strategy. I wish I could give you something more hopeful than that because as I mentioned before, the problem here is that nothing goes along neat geographic lines. But the lines are there nonetheless when we can't ignore them. So I'll close with this. Tom Woods, our friend who spoke earlier, he reminds us, you know, political arrangements exist to serve us, not the other way around. Right, who the hell said that we have to put up with all of this? Can we change ours without bloodshed? That's the question of the 21st century. I think the question of the 20th century was socialism versus property. I think the question of the 21st century is centralized versus decentralized. So in post-Persuasion America where we seem to live, it's not just a matter of intellectual error. There's more to it than that. It's not just about convincing academics and journalists and politicians that our cause is right and you should agree with us. Because it's also about self-interest and power and they don't see for themselves a path to greater self-interest and a path to greater power in the kind of society which all of us in this room would prefer to live in. And they're not just going to let us have it without some effort on our part. And I swear, oh I shouldn't say I swear, I hope very strongly that that path does not involve bloodshed. But there is reason for optimism. There is a decentralized impulse that is working its way across the world. It's coming to America. And I think that is where we have to put our hopes and our efforts. Thank you very much.